Queer/Trans K’s

Realism

Generic

Realist theory relies on a naturalization of the human body along gendered lines in order to legitimize the mythology of the nation-state; political violence is the precondition of sovereignty. This naturalization of the body invisibilizes other violences and erases marginal discourses of resistance in favor of sovereignty.

Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, “Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations,” Introduction, 17-18)CJQ

In realism, violence is natural and inevitable, and violence also marks the boundary between nature and human communities. Violence is sometimes necessary to maintain the political community from external and internal threats. Realism draws a sharp distinction between domestic and international politics, and maintains that states must be able to use or threaten violence in order to maintain the state’s status and survival in the world. The iconic figure in the realist tradition is Hobbes, who is read as telling a relatively simple story of the establishment of the political community that excludes violence from the domestic realm. Realist theories of IR extend Hobbes’s state of nature from individual “natural men” to relations between states. Violence in the form of interstate war is sometimes necessary because states provide protection for citizens not only from other states, but from anarchy and civil war, which could threaten individuals’ lives in the absence of state authority. The objects that are to be defended by the state are, first and foremost, the living breathing bodies of humans as organisms. Sovereign power, in the artificial man of the Leviathan, is constituted precisely to protect the “natural man” (Hobbes 1996 [1651], 9). It is their safety and bodily integrity that is to be protected. In order to foster life, to prevent the life that is “nasty, brutish and short,” the state must be convened. In this logic, the survival of the state’s citizens is dependent upon the survival of the state itself. As Dan Deudney insists, “Security from political violence is the first freedom, the minimum vital task of all primary political associations, and achieving [ 18 ] security requires restraint of the application of violent power upon individual bodies” (2007, 14). To the extent that Hobbes’s work can be said to contribute to theories of embodiment, it is in considering human community on the organic terms of the body politic. This is not an entirely original insight in itself—after all, it makes use of the ancient and medieval philosophy of the great chain of being that orders God and the sovereign king above human subjects. In setting up the figure of the sovereign state as a body politic, Hobbes naturalizes the boundaries of the political community in the boundaries of the human body. The metaphor of the state as body allows for security threats being represented as bodily illnesses, contagions, or cancers, existential threats that threaten the “life” of the state (Sontag 1990 [1978], 72–87; Waldby 1996; Campbell 2000 [1992], 59). The body that is protected by the state as well as the body that is a representation of the state is not only a natural body, but also one that is self-contained and self-governed, internally organized, and bound by concrete borders. Security thus means establishing and protecting this self-governed body as an organism.1 Furthermore, the representation of the state as a body stresses the unity of the body politic. As an individual, the sovereign is not required to recognize any form of difference among his subjects—the body politic has one body and speaks with a single voice (Gatens 1996, 23). Sovereign power, invested in the “artificial body” of the state, is constituted on the basis of a metaphor of the body as indivisible, a singular totality that Rousseau characterizes as the “general will.” As in Hobbes, the sovereign state is constituted in analogy to a human body. “As nature gives each man absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members also; and it is this power which, under the direction of the general will, bears, as I have said, the name of Sovereignty” (Rousseau 1997 [1762], 61). In naturalizing the state as a human body, Hobbes and other social contract theorists further naturalize the human body itself as a singular, indivisible entity whose freedom from violent death is paramount. Hobbes’s story of the foundations of the state calls our attention to the naturalization of political violence in a way that expressly relies upon analogy to a particular conception of the human body. As this body is considered natural, so too is the constitution of the state as body writ large. Just as threats to the human body’s integrity are seen as contamination, so too are border incursions and infiltrations that breach the state’s control over its territory and people. Whereas in realism, sovereign power is constituted in order to protect life, in liberalism, sovereign power is also recognized to be a threat to human life.

Realism is masculine – state rationalities favor instrumental reason and public sphere activities

V.S. Peterson is a Professor of International Relations in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of AZ, “Sexing Political Identities/Nationalism as Heterosexism.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 (1): 34–65. 1999.

This is particularly apparent in international relations (IR), the discipline now haunted by nationalist conicts. Constrained by its positivist and mod- ernist commitments, IR theorists typically assume a Euro-centric model of the agent (subject) as unitary, autonomous, interest-maximizing and rational. IR’s realist commitments additionally cast subjects as inherently competitive. So too with states. The latter are understood as the primary (unifed, rational, self-interested and competitive) actors in international relations, and a collective political identity is assumed rather than interrogated.4 Positivist/ modernist binaries reign in IR and, as feminists have persuasively argued, these binaries are gendered (e.g. Lloyd 1984; Hekman 1990; Haraway 1998; Peterson 1992a). Through conventional IR lenses, the dichotomy of public–private locates political action in the former but not the latter sphere; the dichotomy of internal–external distinguishes citizens and order within from ‘others’ and anarchy without; and the dichotomy of culture–nature (civilized–primitive, advanced–backward, developed–undeveloped) ‘naturalizes’ global hierarchies of power. Most telling for the study of nationalism, positivist dichotomies that favor instrumental reason and public sphere activities fuel a neglect of emotion, desire, sexuality, culture and – hence – identity and identifcation processes.

Realism is not the objective truth of the world – it is constructed through the experiences of a powerful few theorists and forced upon the rest of the world in standards of nation-states and economic development

Agnew 15 (John, Distinguished Professor of Geography at UCLA and editor-in-chief of the journal, "Territory, Politics, Governance." “The Geopolitics of Knowledge About World Politics: A Case Study in U.S. Hegemony.” Geographies of Knowledge and Power (ebook). Volume 7 of the series Knowledge and Space pp 235-246 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9960-7_11#)

Much of what goes for international relations theory today is the projection onto the world at large of U.S.-originated academic ideas about the nature of statehood and the world economy derived from a mixture of mid-twentieth-century European premises about states and American ones about economies even when these ideas can often depart quite remarkably from the apparent contemporary sources of U.S. foreign-policy conduct. The theory reflects the application of ideas about how best to model a presumably hostile world, which are drawn more from selected aspects of U .S. experience and a U .S. reading of world history than from fidelity to how actual U.S. policies are constituted from a mix of domestic interests and foreign-policy inclinations. Contrast the predictions of a defensive U.S. neorealism, for example, which might counsel prudence in invading other countries without a set of clear objectives and an "exit strategy," with recent U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East driven by what Connolly (2005) calls a domestic alliance in the United States between "cowboy capitalism" and evangelical Protestantism. The intellectually dominant realist tradition of U .S. international relations theory (even its opponents, including liberals and idealists, share many of its assumptions) is based on a central assumption of "anarchy" beyond state borders (Agnew, 1994; Powell, 1994). This conception is not a straightforward objective fact about the world but a claim socially constructed by theorists and actors operating in conditioning sites and venues (premier universities, think tanks, government offices, etc.) who unthinkingly reproduce the assumption, drawing on particular interpreta- tions of unimpeachable intellectual precursors (such as the early modern European thinkers Machiavelli and Hobbes) irrespective of its empirical "truth" status. Other related ideas, such as those of a world irretrievably divided into territorial "nation- states" organized along a global continuum of development, and even ideas often presumed to challenge the mainstream view such as "rational choice" and "hegemonic succession," can be thought of similarly as reflecting social and political experiences of particular theorists in specific places more than as objective truth about the world per se. If believed, of course, and if in the hands of those powerful enough, they can become guides to action that make their own reality (Agnew, 2003). The constitutive ideas of so-called realism as developed by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others have taken on a very different form in the hands of the German refugee scholars in the United States, such as Hans Morgenthau, most responsible in the early Cold War years for creating the realist perspective, and then in the hands of more Americanized theorists, such as Robert Gilpin, than the originals might initially suggest could ever be the case (Inayatullah & Rupert, 1994). Most notably, what became in the 1970s and 1980s the main consensus position, so-called neorealism, combines elements of classical political realism and liberal economics that have traveled some intellectual distance from their geographical roots in, respectively, Renaissance Italy (with Machiavelli) and late eighteenth-century Scotland (with Adam Smith) (Donnelly, 1995). This American synthesis and related emphases have ruled the academic roost in international relations much as the neoclassical synthesis has in U .S. academic economics.

Realism can’t explain foreign policy – it is centered too much on the American position, and it is trapped in the domain of the elite

Agnew 15 (John, Distinguished Professor of Geography at UCLA and editor-in-chief of the journal, "Territory, Politics, Governance." “The Geopolitics of Knowledge About World Politics: A Case Study in U.S. Hegemony.” Geographies of Knowledge and Power (ebook). Volume 7 of the series Knowledge and Space pp 235-246 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9960-7_11#)

In this understanding, states stand as naturalized abstract individuals, the equivalent of individual persons in the realm of "international relations"; the distribution of technological and other economic advantages drives communication, competition, and cooperation; central or hegemonic states rise and fall as they succeed or fail in capturing the economic benefits of hierarchy; and the overall dynamic as far as each state is concerned is of gaining improvement in "advantage," either absolute (typically realist) or relative (typically liberal), within the overall system (Agnew, 2003). The heart of the perspective is a conception of a state of nature in the world in which the pursuit of wealth and power is projected onto states as the only way of escaping from the grasp of anarchy. A Freudian egotism is translated from the realm of the individual to that of the state (e.g., Schuett, 2007). Thus, a particular cultural conception of life is projected onto the world at large (Inayatullah & Rupert, 1994, pp. 81—82). More specifically, the belief in spontaneous order long regarded in the American ethos as the persisting motif of Americanism, as individuals pursue their own goals unhindered by government and thereby reach a higher synthesis out of disparate intentions, is thus brought to bear in the broader global arena with states now substituting for persons, albeit now tinged with a Germanic-Lutheran pessimism that necessitates interventions by the United States as the most benign and public-minded of "powers" when the "best" order fails to arise spontaneously (Agnew, 2005, p. 97; Grunberg, 1990; Inayatullah, 1997; Nossal, 2001). The connection with actual U.S. foreign-policy making is crucial. Though international relations has claimed both a basis in the eternal facts of human nature and/or the state-systemic constraints on political action and an advisory role to the U.S. government in pursuit of its particular interests, it has been the latter that has tended to dominate. As a putative policy field, international relations has long attracted adherents more through its putative practical appeal than through its intellectual rigor (Kahler, 1997). Kripendorff (1989, pp. 31—32) refers to this attraction as the "Kissinger syndrome" or the "ambition to be accepted by or adopted into the real world of policy making, to gain access to the inner halls of power." He sees this ambition as something specifically American in its desire to provide a fixed intellectual foundation for why international relations must remain the domain of a specialized elite rather than be subject to democratic discussion and critique. In his view, since the inception of the field following the Second Word War, the goal of international relations was the training of specialists and practitioners, not the creation of a "critical scholarly enterprise" (Kripendorff, 1989, p. 36). In fact, considerable energy in academic international relations today in the United States and elsewhere focuses on the weaknesses of the neorealist synthesis even as the master's programs continue to churn out would-be practitioners often oblivious to the political and theoretical bases of the arcane debates among some of their teachers (Long et al., 2005). The continuing, even revived, appeal of the neorealist synthesis seems to lie in its ritual appeal to U.S. centrality to world politics (the "necessary nation," "the lender of last resort," etc.) and in the enhanced sense since the end of the Cold War and after 9/11 of a dangerous and threatening world that must be approached with trepidation and preparation for potential violent reaction and intervention as mandated by realist thinking. Yet in practice there is a massive gap between the predictions of such theorizing and what actually goes into the making of U.S. (or any other) foreign policy, much of which has to do with persisting geopolitical orderings of the world and domestic interests and their relative lobbying capacities (Hellmann, 2009; Oren, 2009).

China Specific

Realism is a consequence of American hegemony and Eurocentrism – when applied to Northeast Asia, it fails to understand the motives of security

Beeson 14 (Mark, Professor of International Politics at Murdoch University. Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 1(1) 1–23 http://aia.sagepub.com/content/1/1/1.full.pdf)

And yet one of the most important theoretical innovations in broadly conceived security studies over the last few decades has been the ‘constructivist turn’ in particular (Ruggie, 1998; Wendt, 1999), and a more general appreciation of the importance of non-material factors in shaping security outcomes. It has become increasingly obvious that national attitudes to security and the policy priorities they generate are the consequence of complex, dialectical processes in which ‘international interaction affects domestic struggles within states over the definition of the collective interest’ (Legro, 2005, p. 21). In other words, even such realist staples as the ‘national interest’ are socially constructed artefacts and reflections of very different trajectories and experiences of development (Weldes, 1996). As a consequence, as Reus-Smit (1999, p. 27) points out, states not only develop different ideas about the purposes to which state power might be put, but the structures of governance are institutionalized in significantly distinctive ways too. If we want to understand and try to account for continuing differences in state behaviour, we need to take historical contexts and the variations in state forms they generate rather more seriously than realists do. The potential importance of differences in the internal architecture of states for security outcomes has long been recognized (Huntington, 1968). What is striking about recent scholarship, however, is the attention given to questions of culture and identity in explaining national variations in security practice. The seminal contributions of Peter Katzenstein (1996), Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein (1996) and Katzenstein and Sil (2004) in particular has significantly broadened debates about security in ways that help explain the continuing differences in security practice and thinking in Asia. The key point to emphasize here is not that norms or identity will necessarily trump material factors—although they are plainly more likely to exert an influence in an era of declining inter-state conflict (Pinker, 2012)—but that they provide a part of an explanation for variations in security policy and attitudes around the world. The interest in ‘strategic culture’ offers one way of thinking about why militaries respond differently to supposedly universal and timeless threats (Alagappa, 2001; Johnston, 1995). Once again, historically contingent contexts provide a compelling part of the explanation of continuing difference. In this regard, Asia’s history is more consequential than most. Because so much IR theory is predicated on a limited, comparatively recent Western historical experience, there is a real danger of overlooking or underestimating the significance and the contemporary legacy of the larger part of human history. China is known among other things for being the world’s oldest continuing civilization, not to mention a source of some of the most important innovations that distinguish the modern world. It is a testimony to the powerful influence of Eurocentricism that such historical patterns and influences are frequently dismissed or underestimated (Hobson, 2012), even when the focus of analytical behaviour is East Asia or China itself. And yet it would be remarkable if some aspects of China’s unique history were not reflected in the way its leaders and general population thought about themselves. We have, after all, become accustomed to the people and leaders of the US believing that they have a unique historical mission, which helps explain, if not legitimate, their prominent role in recent international history (Smith, 1994). Why would we expect China (or anywhere else for that matter) to be any different—especially at a historical moment when they have the wherewithal to actively promote a vision of themselves on the international stage (Zhang, 2013). It is important to recognize that one reason we are collectively and so heavily influenced by American IR theory is not simply because there are a lot of excellent IR scholars in that country, but because the US is the hegemonic power of the era and has a capacity to exert an ideational influence that other countries simply cannot match (Smith, 2002). Such considerations assume a renewed importance in the current era for a number of reasons. First, many believe the US to be in at least relative decline, partly as a consequence of its domestic economic and political problems, but primarily because of the remarkable ‘rise of China’ (Brzezinski, 2012; Layne, 2012). Under such circumstances, we might expect to see a concomitant decline in the US’s ‘soft power’ and the growing influence of alternative narratives about historical development and the future of the international system. That is precisely what appears to be happening (Bremmer, 2012), which is why Asia’s alternative historical experience potentially assumes such importance. If Asia’s past is unlike the West’s there is no reason to suppose that its current or future developmental experiences will necessarily replicate the West’s either. Before we consider the possible implications of this claim, it is worth spelling out just how different Asia’s past actually was.

The security rhetoric of the aff locks in supremacy of one power in Northeast Asia as a violent, self-fulfilling prophecy – vote neg to reject the passive-aggressive discourses that constantly imply containment

Beeson 14 (Mark, Professor of International Politics at Murdoch University. Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 1(1) 1–23 http://aia.sagepub.com/content/1/1/1.full.pdf)

There are, then, widely noted parallels between East Asia’s historical development and Europe’s, although in this case it is Europe of the nineteenth, rather than the twentieth century (Friedberg, 2000; Joffe, 1995). Although the US’s role as an ‘offshore balancer’ is rather different to that of Britain’s in the nineteenth century, some see this as a natural evolution of American grand strategy (Layne, 1997). More recently, a number of scholars have argued that the durable balance of power that Europe developed in the nineteenth century actually offers a model for maintaining stability in East Asia in the twenty-first. Developing a similar regional ‘concert of powers’ would, the argument goes, allow China’s inevitable rise to be accommodated peacefully. For Hugh White (2012, p. 6) Asia’s alternative futures are not American or Chinese supremacy. They are escalating rivalry, or some form of great-power accommodation that constrains that rivalry. America’s real choice is not between dominating or withdrawing from Asia: it is between taking China on as a strategic rival, or working with it as a partner. Whatever the merits of White’s claims, the recent pivot suggest there is little appetite among US policymakers for accepting a diminished role on the region (Clinton, 2011). The net consequence of the US’s decision to reassert itself, however, as noted China-watcher Robert Ross (2012, p. 81) points out, is that ‘by threatening China and challenging its sovereignty claims over symbolic territories, Washington has encouraged Chinese leaders to believe that only by adopting belligerent policies will a rising China be able to guarantee its security’. Unsurprisingly, China’s strategic elites do, indeed, see the recent shift in US policy as an effort to contain them (Swaine, 2012b). In this regard, the evolving strategic context in East Asia looks rather more like the bipolarity of the Cold War than a concert powers. Whichever historical analogy proves more apt, the contemporary reality is rather deflating and arguably at odds with what seemed until recently to be the most immediate and very tangible security threats confronting the region (Dupont, 2001). Self-evidently, the continuing economic development upon which the legitimacy and political authority of the region’s elites continues to depend would be profoundly affected by any actual conflict. In this regard the liberals do have a point: the economic and political risks of conflict have made war and conquest completely irrational. This is not to say, of course, that this rules conflict out. An even more unambiguous threat to continuing development and stability is climate change and the damage being inflicted on the natural environment across the region—a clear and present danger if ever there was one (Dyer, 2010), but an issue that is being sidelined by the growing preoccupation with more ‘traditional’ threats to national security. Indeed, for all the talk of transnational threats and opportunities at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is remarkable how the strategic calculus of the region’s elites continues to reflect the thinking of their counterparts in the twentieth and even the nineteenth centuries.